Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

More on dynamic systems

In
several posts above I noted how image schema were in the middle of
classical taxonomic hierarchies. That in itself changes said assumptions
inherent to hierarchical complexity. So see this
article by Kurt Fischer (also cited in several posts above) on dynamic
skill theory wherein he uses dynamic systems theory. In particular, see
the section on this starting at page 20. E.g., as related to the middle
of things:

"People act in medias res – in the middle of things in the real
world, not merely as logical agents acting on objects rationally and
without emotion."

This statement is in the context of discussing developmental skill
capacity, how it varies over a wide range depending on environmental
support. I have though associated it with image schema, and how the
latter change the very nature of hierarchical complexity.

And I'm reminded of Zak Stein's essay
on mind as ecosystem, which first off acknowledges Lakoff et al. for
how metaphors affect how we approach the world. The mind as computer
metaphor has a host of working assumptions that delimit modeling, not
the least of which is classical set theory based thereon. Stein studyed
with Fischer at Harvard so took the latter's dynamic systems approach to
development including this ecological tenet: "There is not one central
'unit' that can serve as an overall measure of the ecosystem." Hence the
use of dynamic systems theory to account for these 'multifractal'
interactions.